Handle "too long" or "too short", even at 1 character difference

[Tangeek42]

Hi.
Apologies if this has been addressed, but other than the "Invalid Handle" issue, which is not exactly my case, I couldn't find anything regarding this.

When trying to register a new account on a freshly installed PDS, for the sandbox, I get either a Too Short or Too Long error, even with a single character difference. I can't go past this screen using the web app.

I'm guessing there is actually something else going on under the hood but I've no idea where to look with this software. There doesn't seem to be any log stored under /pds ?

The PDS is responding fine to /xrpc/_health. I should mention it doesn't use Caddy as a reverse proxy but nginx (this is not negotiable, as I have other websites sharing the IP). The reverse proxy blindly forwards the requests so it shouldn't be interfering.

Version: 0.3.0-beta.3

[bnewbold]

The experience and errors here aren't great, sorry about that.

These are all actually perfectly find handles per the spec. I think what is happening here is that there are additional PDS-level restrictions on handles at account-signup, and those are combining in a bad way. The PDS prevents the first "part" of the handle from having fewer than 3 characters for new account: this is opinionated, to prevent conflicts with things like language-codes and country-codes, and a land-rush on short handles. Separately the PDS has a restriction on total handle length as a usability thing to make handles more readable. In both cases the protocol (atproto) is more flexible, these are just implementation-specific best practices.

These are combining poorly here. One work-around would be to make some of the intermediate sub-domains shorter (eg, bsky not bluesky, or remove the test). Another would be to patch the PDS source code to remove these restrictions.

[Tangeek42]

The experience and errors here aren't great, sorry about that.

No need to apologize, this is expected in a WIP.

Indeed I managed to pass that screen with a shorter domain and the user handle I wanted. Thanks for the help, it seems to be as you said.

Speaking strictly as an end-user without knowing what's involved in the code, I do think it should be patched in PDS. There are bound to be long domain names when federation starts working, especially domains in punycode.